Exploring the World Through Play

A Winter Landscape

This idea was taken from Mister Maker, which N and I were watching the other morning and decided to copy there and then. It’s a simple idea but a delightful one, and whilst ours was quite basic, this is something that can be taken as far as the limits of childrens creativity and enthusiasm!

The basic idea is to create a wintery scene using sicks painted white and sprinkled with glitter. Mister maker stood his trees in airdrying clay before painting them. We made salt dough instead – using the basic “half:half:whole ratio of water:salt:flour. This meant we had to leave our sticks standing in the dough overnight while the dough dried, and even then had to speed up the process in the micropwave (I’m taking no responsibility for anyone who also decides to put sticks in the microwave – I watched them very closely!).

Sticks, Standing in Salt Dough

Once they were dry, L and N painted them white:

We then used a silver foil tray for the base, which they painted with PVA glue before sprinking sugar on top:

We added the trees, with the paint still wet, and sprinkled liberally with silver and blue glitter. We used purple paper for the background, decorated with sticky stars:

We kept ours deliberately simple, so that L and N could use their imaginations and add fairies, winter creatures, snowmen etc from their playmobil, lego and happylands collections, but the basic idea could be used as elaborately as you like – I think this allows for lots of small world / imaginary play :-)